Linked List: March 2010

Wednesday, 31 March 2010

Speaking of video: Apple asserts that the iPad runs 10 hours on a charge of its nonremovable battery — but we all know you can’t trust the manufacturer. And sure enough, in my own test, the iPad played movies continuously from 7:30 a.m. to 7:53 p.m. — more than 12 hours. That’s four times as long as a typical laptop or portable DVD player.

After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop.

In fact, after a week with the iPad, I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?

If you haven’t been following the fight over the legality of warrantless wiretapping, this case, involving lawyers working with the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, is extremely important. When it was revealed that the Bush administration was wiretapping phonecalls without a warrant, lawsuits were filed — but the “problem” was that the parties (such as the ACLU) that filed the lawsuits didn’t have “standing” because they had no evidence that they, personally, were impacted by the warrantless wiretapping. This created a ridiculous Catch-22 situation. As long as the government hid its illegal activities and never said who it spied on, it could spy on anyone illegally. No one could bring a lawsuit, since there was no proof that they had been impacted by the illegal spying.

Then the feds screwed up. They accidentally sent the evidence of wiretapping some lawyers for the Al-Haramain group to those lawyers.

With analog cables, the signal degrades, with digital cables such as HDMI, it either works or it doesn’t. The signal doesn’t degrade any more than your JPEGs degrade when you put them on a thumb drive.

Asus is about to roll out its own iPad rivals. In an interview with Forbes, Shih revealed that Asus is planning to release “at least two” tablet PCs in the coming months. […] Shih said one Asus tablet will likely run Google software, such as the upcoming open-source operating system, Chrome, or the mobile operating system, Android.

They don’t know yet? (And if it’s Chrome OS, just how soon could it arrive?)

Tuesday, 30 March 2010

The idea is to fight the current Android fragmentation, where there are still phones being sold with OS 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0, and with no upgrades to the current 2.1 in sight, that future versions of the OS will have all major apps and components upgradeable via the Android Market. Chris Ziegler writes:

Put simply, Google’s been iterating the core far faster than most of its partners have been able to keep up.

Google has been iterating quickly, but the problem is that carriers aren’t interested in any updates at all for phones they’ve already sold. The carriers have learned nothing from the iPhone, or, maybe they just don’t care about Android as a platform.

So, in the end, OS version fragmentation may be less of a problem for Android users — two years from now. Current Android users, except for Nexus One owners, are shit out of luck. Hope you like Android 1.6 if that’s what your phone shipped with.

Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

Update: Email from a DF reader:

I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.

Tell them to “click the disk” and they look around for a CD icon. Tell them to “click the floppy disk” and they laugh at the word “floppy.” The machines have floppy disk drives, but the kids have never seen them used.

I hadn’t heard anything about a name, but “HD” makes sense given the 960 × 640 display. If they’re going to call it the HD, then perhaps the main camera will shoot HD video, too? I don’t see how a phone named “HD” could have a camera that only shoots standard-def video.

Engadget also reports a possible introduction event date of June 22. Last year Apple announced the 3GS at the WWDC keynote in early June. If WWDC is held the week of, say, June 7, I wouldn’t bet against an announcement then.

It’s quite inevitable, really: after Google announced free turn-by-turn GPS navigation for Android devices — followed by Nokia’s decision to offer the same on its smartphones — the price of full-featured GPS navigation apps on other platforms is hurtling towards zero.

The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

Monday, 29 March 2010

Apple Inc. is developing a new iPhone to debut this summer and also appears to be working on a model for U.S. mobile phone operator Verizon Wireless, say people briefed on the matter.

Keep in mind there’s a big difference between “is” and “appears to be”. And they have no actual details of the next-generation iPhone. Nothing. Not the A4-family CPU system-on-a-chip. Not the 960 × 640 double-resolution display. Not the second front-facing camera. Not even the third-party multitasking in iPhone OS 4. All they have is that there’s going to be a new iPhone this summer, period. Thanks for the scoop, Yukari Iwatani Kane.

But what interests me about all this is the underlying war going on between those playing the pageview game, and those that hate the pageview game. To put it another (simplified) way: the war between quality versus quantity.

Siegler comes close to getting it, but falls short. Pageviews, as a metric used for directly billing advertisers, are a scam. Publishers game it with sensational link-bait articles and bullshit tricks like breaking articles into multiple “pages”. Advertisers get stuck paying for valueless impressions. Readers get stuck with the sensational bullshit articles, the tricks (like breaking single articles into multiple “pages”), and suffer through too many annoying ads surrounding actual content.

It is, as Jim Coudal and I argued at SXSW, a race to the bottom. Be careful of the “everyones” who say pageviews are imperfect but the best we can do. They’re the ones who are happy with the web as a market for bullshit.

Harry McCracken, looking back at Microsoft Bob, 15 years after its release:

Analyst Charles Finnie of Volpe, Welty & Co. called Microsoft’s product a threat to the very existence of Microsoft’s competitor in Cupertino. “Bob is going to be another nail in Apple’s coffin unless Apple can somehow raise the standard yet again on the ease-of-use front,” he told the AP.

It’s interesting, to say the least, that a device promising to be the best browsing experience — cue Scott Forestall crazy eyes — is in fact reshaping the internet. You could argue it’s for the better, moving sites away from proprietary formats and heavy, resource-sucking designs to more open standards, and more efficient layouts that are easier to use (as many have, convincingly).

I’ll confess: Every year, I’m one of those guys that gripes about SXSWi being too big, about the content being poor, and about the assumption that this year is finally the peak year and things will die off next year.

We have a very strong strategic alliance
with Adobe, and we continue to believe that it is in our interests and
the interests of our customers to be at the forefront of innovation on
around the Flash Platform. Our work with HTML5 is in addition to, not
instead of, our work with Flash.

This “HTML5 video in addition to Flash” strategy is the way it’s going to go across the board. The question is what sites will serve to browsers like Safari and Chrome, which support both.

Sunday, 28 March 2010

NPD found pricing, even among Apple product owners, to be a major issue, with 43 percent of respondents saying they found the iPad too expensive. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 57 percent cited price as the No. 1 reason they weren’t ready to head to the Apple store April 3 — or any time soon.

Hmm, but what about back in January, when rumors (reported by The Wall Street Journal) held that the iPad would be announced with prices starting at $999? ChangeWave Research found:

Among interested consumers, three-quarters say they’re willing to pay $500 or more for the new ‘iSlate,’ and 37% say they’d pay more than $700.

When we asked consumers what price would discourage them from buying an Apple tablet, 70% of respondents said anything over $700 would be a deal killer. On the other hand, 30% appear to have the desire, deep pockets, and willingness to spend more than $700 which isn’t bad.

The people responding to these surveys aren’t stupid — they want to pay less money. It’s the people conducting and publishing these surveys, pretending they mean anything, who are stupid. The only “pricing survey” that matters is the market. I’m pretty sure the iPad is going to do just fine there.

The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

The Hollywood Reporter, on the 100 different versions of Avatar created for various countries, theater, and screen sizes:

In some cases, a single multiplex required different versions for
different auditorium configurations. Creative decisions involving
light levels also led to additional versions. 3D projection and
glasses cut down the light the viewer sees, so “Avatar” also had
separate color grades at different light levels, which are
measured in foot lamberts.

“If we had just sent out one version of the movie, it would have
been very dark (in the larger theaters),” Barnett says. “We had a
very big flow chart with all of the different steps, so we could
send the right media to the right theater.”

Apple officials gave the Army group tours of its laboratories and
other facilities and talked about some examples of where the
military is already using Apple technology. The Army’s research
and development command is evaluating commercial hand-held
solutions such as iPad, iPhone, iPod, iMac, and MacBook platforms.

The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect
reinforced by the powerful conservative tendencies of the
financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.

Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by
most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride
on manipulating Bloomberg’s current “complex” interface. The pain
inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and
yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding
experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.

I’ve backed a couple of Kickstarter projects so far, and there’s a visceral satisfaction that comes whenever I get a backers’ reward in the mail. We — or at least I — deal with so much that takes place as pixels on screens that physical artifacts are more meaningful, more important, than ever. I know I’m backing a Kickstarter project when I send the money, but I feel like I’m involved when I get something in my hand in return. Artifact is the only word I can find that fits.

The Vanderbilt Republic has a follow-up project at Kickstarter now, to raise funds to process the 1,600 sheets of 4×5-inch film they shot in Cambodia over six weeks. Count me in.

David Pogue on Line2, a very Google Voice-like VOIP app for the iPhone that Apple accepted into the App Store.

Curiously, at this moment Line2’s web site claims “Toktumi and Line2 are currently experiencing a denial of service attack. We are trying to isolate the attackers and restore service. Please stand by.”

Update: Even more curiously, Line2 can no longer be found in the App Store. This URL, for example, now leads to a “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the US store” error.

Interesting, technical look at the pixel-level details of the Nexus One’s OLED display:

The result is that PenTile works great on the Nexus One screen
when color photographs are being displayed—it just doesn’t
work as well for text because text is always displayed with high
contrast to make it readable. And it’s arguable that text
display is the most important use-case to optimize for on a
mobile phone screen.

For various reasons, I don’t expect Apple to use OLED. I think Apple is all-in on LED-backlit IPS displays (which they’re using for the iPad and iMac, and promoting in the tech specs).

Thursday, 25 March 2010

Well, at least part of the answer appears to be that Google is
sharing advertising revenues with carriers that use Android,
according to multiple sources who are familiar with the deals. In
some cases, sources said, Google is also cutting deals with the
handset makers. The revenue-sharing agreements only occur when the
handsets come with Google applications, like search, maps and
gmail, since that is not a requirement of Android. Google declined
to comment, and said terms of its agreements with partners are
confidential.

So, when handset makers use Windows Mobile, they pay Microsoft. When they use Android, they get paid by Google.

I’d like to add another argument to this that further negates
these so-called patent threats against Theora. If Theora is so
sensitive to patents, as MPEG-LA, Apple, and its supporters claim
— than why on earth would one of the biggest technology companies
in the world ship it as part of its browser and as part of its
operating system?

I’m of course talking about Google. Google has implemented support
for Theora in its Chrome web browser, as well as in its upcoming
Chrome OS. Do you really think a large and visible company like
Google, a very attractive target for patent trolls, would include
it if it had even the slightest worries about infringement claims?
Would one of the world’s most profitable tech companies willingly
paint such a big bulls-eye on itself, especially now that this
debate has been raging for so long?

Chrome’s support for Ogg Theora is perhaps an indication that Google’s lawyers believe it doesn’t violate any of MPEG-LA’s patents. I think even if MPEG-LA believes otherwise, they wouldn’t start litigating unless and until Ogg Theora actually became popular. As it stands now, H.264 is crushing Ogg Theora in the market. Why sue now?

Update: Further, Google is an MPEG-LA licensee. Even if Ogg Theora is found to be in violation of one or more patents in the H.264 pool, Google has already licensed the rights for those patents, no?

A pair of European researchers used the spotlight of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking contest here to break into a fully patched iPhone and hijack the entire SMS database, including text messages that had already been deleted.

The N.F.L. approved a new overtime rule for the playoffs Tuesday
that will give each team at least one possession in the extra
period unless the team that wins the overtime coin toss scores a
touchdown on its first possession.

The problem with the old rule: almost 60 percent of overtime games were being won by the team that won the coin flip. I like the change, but why only for the playoffs?

If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and
ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability —
what should we do with UI elements we don’t want users to click
on? Like, say, the “delete all my work” button?

With the imminent arrival of the Apple iPad, it seems at least one
major television network is updating their website to provide
video playback support for new tablet device — without Flash.
CBS.com’s website began displaying a couple of strange “iPad -
test” video links, first noted by The Other Mac Blog.

One of the downsides to the initial download is that it can take
some time depending on your connection and the number of contacts
you have. Waiting for anything sucks, but what sucks more is being
bored while waiting.

So we decided to give you something to do while the initial
download is in progress.

We’re one week out from the iPad ship date, but Adam Lisagor nailed it back on February 6:

What we want from our technology, in its most elemental form, is
to make our thoughts happen. Sure, it’s still very much sci-fi
in 2010, but what every calculating machine and telephone and
computer and phonograph and light bulb and hammer and every tool
ever invented is about at its core is our desire, our evolutionary
imperative to control our environment at our will. And we’re
getting closer and closer to that happening.

While I could have taken the conservative option and waited until
a month or two after the iPad’s release before launching
Instapaper for it, an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a
device I want to own.

While Apple has just 7% of the share of revenue, it’s grabbing 35%
of the operating profit. Deutsche Bank attributes it to the
strength of the Mac/Macbook lineup. Other companies are losing
profit margins because they have to pay Microsoft for software.

Barely four years after Apple opened the store in the basement of
the General Motors tower, Bohlin’s ethereal one-story structure —
a glorified vestibule, really — has become a must-see attraction
as well as Apple’s highest-grossing location. According to Cornell
University scientists who analyzed 35 million Flickr images, the
Cube is the fifth-most-photographed building in New York, the 28th
worldwide.

Ahead of it on the list: The Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and Grand Central Terminal. Good company.

Opera is taking an interesting position with regard to the submission of Opera Mini for iPhone: making the waiting period very public.

(My money, by the way, says Apple will accept the app. I know there’s much speculation that Apple won’t allow an alternative browser that doesn’t use the system version of WebKit, but Opera Mini isn’t doing JavaScript client-side, so it doesn’t break the “no interpreters” rule. Update: And if there’s a problem, I bet it’s the security ramifications of Opera Mini’s design.)

As an experiment in new new media thinking, I recently
crowdsourced a new new literature version of Charles Dickens’s
musty old old old lit chestnut, Great Expectations—the familiar
tale of Pip, Ms Havisham, the convict Magwitch, et al.

Just submitted to the App Store this week. Color me skeptical regarding their claims that it’s the “most used browser on mobile devices”, though. Most-installed, maybe, but more used than MobileSafari? (StatCounter’s global stats have Opera listed first, but list “iPhone” and “iPod Touch” separately. Add them together and MobileSafari would be first. Who knows whether StatCounter’s metrics are accurate, though.)

I’ve tried the Android version (which seems extremely similar to the iPhone version) on the Nexus One, and it is indeed fast. But the speed advantage is most noticeable over EDGE; on Wi-Fi, it’s about the same, but the rendering is worse. Definitely interesting, though.

I love Kottke’s take on user reviews (of books, movies, etc.) that focus on the packaging or format:

Newspaper and magazine reviewers pretty much ignore this stuff.
There’s little mention of whether a book would be good to read on
a Kindle, if you should buy the audiobook version instead of the
hardcover because John Hodgman has a delightful voice, if a
magazine is good for reading on the toilet, if a movie is
watchable on an iPhone or if you need to see it in 1080p on a big
TV, if a hardcover is too heavy to read in the bath, whether the
trailer is an accurate depiction of what the movie is about, or if
the hardcover price is too expensive and you should get the Kindle
version or wait for the paperback.

Perseus Books Group, a large independent publisher that also
distributes works from 330 other smaller presses including
Grove Atlantic, Harvard Business School Press, Zagat and City
Lights Books, signed a deal last week with Apple, following
five of the six biggest publishers that have already signed
agreements with Apple.

The Times headline states “Perseus Signs an EBooks Deal for the iPad”, which is, I think, shortsighted. The deal is for Apple’s iBooks store, not the iPad. Right now the iPad is the only device Apple has announced for iBooks, but I’ll eat my hat if there isn’t an iBooks app for the iPhone some time later this year.

Paul Carr on the 64 one-star reviews at Amazon for Michael Lewis’s new best-seller, The Big Short:

There’s just one problem with that message: less than half of those
one star reviews are actually reviewing the book.

Instead, most of the reviewers’ ire relates to the fact that
publishers WW Norton have decided not to release a Kindle version of
the book at the same time as its hardback release. Writes one
(pretty representative) reviewer by the name of Ben Kaplan:

“I’d like to add my name to the list of people who are very
disappointed that this book does not have a Kindle edition. No, I
haven’t read the book, but I want to — on my Kindle! If all these
one star reviews lead to fewer sales, I think that would be a
great result and an excellent lesson for the author/publisher.”

Some publishers are treating Kindle editions like paperbacks — something to release only after the hardcover edition has run its course.

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all
sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with
access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more
weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their
overall caloric intake was the same.

Update: I missed his second page (I generally don’t click through to split pages any more), where he lists the ten things that are driving him crazy. Numbers 1-3: Quirkiness/misbehavior, tapping trouble, and maddening usability mistakes. I.e. it’s just not designed well.

It’ll back you up to external hard drives, or computers on your
network, or flat-rate cloud storage, but its great innovation is
the ability to back up over the internet, with permission, to
another CrashPlan user. This is terrific for maintaining your own
automatic offsite backups between work and home, or spreading
backup religion to friends and family. All you need is broadband
and spare disk space.

When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he
was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to
say — but what is equally true — is that he also wants
Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed — if they govern
successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of
office — Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less
angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for
Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican
values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry.

James Surowiecki on how the action, in markets ranging from gadgets to cars to clothes, is at the high and low ends of the market, not the middle:

The companies there — Sony, Dell, General Motors, and the like —
find themselves squeezed from both sides (just as, in a way,
middle-class workers do in a time of growing income inequality).
The products made by midrange companies are neither exceptional
enough to justify premium prices nor cheap enough to win over
value-conscious consumers. Furthermore, the squeeze is getting
tighter every day.

The middle is boring, and I think one could argue that our culture is about the elimination of boredom. (Via Kottke.)

Congress gave final approval on Sunday to legislation that would
provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured
Americans and remake the nation’s health care system along the
lines proposed by President Obama.

Friday, 19 March 2010

My thanks to the Omni Group for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote OmniGraphSketcher, their outstanding “fast, simple graph drawing and data plotting” app for the Mac. This is one of those apps where you just have to try it (the demo is free) to understand how cool it is. Precise data plotting combined with easy to use drawing tools.

Submissions in by March 27 “will be considered for” the grand opening of the iPad App Store. Seems a little nutty that the vast majority of them have been tested (by developers) only using the simulator.

The message seems to be that Palm is in serious trouble — not just merely “struggling”, but in dire straits.

I don’t really understand why. Their WebOS phones are, to my eyes, the best competitors to the iPhone. People who own them seem to like them. Their marketing hasn’t been great, but it’s been better than Android’s. But Android is taking off and WebOS isn’t, and, trite though it sounds, Palm really has bet the company on WebOS.

Starting at the end of March, we will move from the “retail
model” of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who
then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to
the “agency model” (publishers set the price, and retailers
take a commission on the sale to readers). We will make this
change with all our e-book retailers simultaneously.

Thursday, 18 March 2010

And what’s up with the lack of cut/copy and paste? This is a
basic OS feature that Apple included in the first Mac OS almost 25
years ago. It’s inexplicably missing from the iPhone,
unavailable in any application or the wider system itself. Unreal.

The multitasking is limited. Users will only be able to get apps
from the Marketplace, and not from third parties. Gasp! Is it true
that there’s no copy and paste?

No matter. Windows Phone combines those very few things that were
right about Windows Mobile — primarily some business
functionality — with a much wider set of new functionality that
is exciting in both scope and possibility.

At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically
by Amazon in a recent phone call initiated by the etailer that
Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with any other
publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This
publisher was told that if they switched to an agency model for
ebooks, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and
digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated
that as matter of policy they are declining to negotiate an agency
model with any publisher outside of the five who have already
announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.

“Agency model” is apparently industry jargon for publishers setting their own prices per title, rather than accepting a flat selling price set by Amazon.

The two sites that were most frequently mentioned by programmers
who contacted Wired.com were TheiPhoneAppReview.com and
AppCraver.com. Both sites appear in the top four Google search
results for the search term “iPhone app review.”

The preferred formats are JPEG for photographic images, SVG for
drawings and line-art illustration, PNG for non-vector graphic
iconic images, Ogg Vorbis for sound and Ogg Theora for video.

So, there’s one major site that uses Ogg. But, I can’t say I recall ever watching video from Wikipedia, so while they’re clearly a major web site, I’m not sure it’s fair to call them a major video publisher.

Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube in its litigation with Viacom:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content
to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence
there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to
upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the
videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube
accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to
Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to
Viacom. […]

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked
so well that even its own employees could not keep track of
everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result,
on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that
it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask
for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that
Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Free iPhone app (also available for Android and BlackBerry) that, like the aforelinked web site, offers a database of instructions for getting a human customer service representative from a list of over 600 companies.

In my piece on backups earlier this week, I mentioned that I wasn’t storing my Yojimbo library on Dropbox. A bunch of Yojimbo users emailed me to tell me you can do it, and you can even use it for syncing a shared Yojimbo library between multiple Macs — if you’re careful never to run Yojimbo from more than a single Mac at a time. I don’t like having to be careful, so, personally, I wouldn’t use Dropbox with Yojimbo for syncing — but it’s worth noting that Yojimbo attempts to detect this situation, where you’ve left it running on machine A and launched it on machine B, and warns you accordingly.

However, in my case, I only ever access Yojimbo from one machine. I want to use Dropbox to store my database for off-site storage and backup. And, indeed, it seems to work just fine. You move your ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/ folder inside your Dropbox folder, then create a symlink in ~/Library/Application Support/ pointing to the new location. (You have to use a symlink; an alias won’t work.)

Nice to be able to read Kindle e-books on another class of machine, but this is a very un-Mac-like Mac app. Look at these dialog boxes here and here, for example. The icon is, to my eyes, the exact same as the iPhone Kindle app. The name of the app is “Kindle for Mac”, rather than just “Kindle”.

The reading experience isn’t too bad, but the type rendering is smudgy (it’s certainly not using Mac OS X’s built-in type rendering) and you can’t select text. Even worse: you can’t search. You’d be better off with scanned images of the print versions of books, because at least then you’d get high quality typesetting. In short, this is better than no Mac Kindle client at all, but it feels very junky. If Apple comes out with a Mac iBooks client, it’s going to blow this away.

“Jerry joined Apple’s Board in 1997 when most doubted the company’s future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of
Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists.
Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank
loans as a source of growth.

Before heading to the emergency room, I climbed into the back of
the ambulance where I asked her if she wanted me to call her
boyfriend. She said she did, but she didn’t know his telephone
number. It was lost along with her now obliterated cell phone, and
she had never committed the number to memory.

Clever iPhone stand, perfect for propping up an iPhone to watch video. Got one at SXSW (black, of course) from Brendan Dawes of MagneticNorth; it has a great feel to it. (Currently shipping from the U.K., so you might want to order a couple for friends if you’re shipping to the U.S. to make it worthwhile.)

Excellent critique from Alexander Murphy (pseudonymous Hollywood visual effects supervisor) explaining what’s wrong about all the recent 3D live action films other than Avatar — they were made “3D” in post-production rather than being shot in true 3D with dual cameras. I didn’t even like Up in 3D, which wasn’t live action. The one and only 3D theatrical film I’ve ever seen where the 3D made the experience better rather than worse was Avatar. (Some of the 3D attractions at Disney World are good, too.)

Peg your off-site rotation to a date-certain (like how you
probably changed the 9-volt in your smoke alarm for Daylight
Savings Time yesterday). I do my rotations within the first five
days of each new month. So, yes, do automate the creation of
backups, but then also do the physical rotation like you’d pay
your mortgage. On time and without fail.

If there’s a weakness in my own system, it’s that I don’t do this often enough. I like the idea of doing it on the first of the month.

Speaking of The New Yorker, this week’s issue sports another cover painting by Jorge Colombo, made on his iPhone using Brushes. I wonder whether this will be the last one he makes on an iPhone rather than an iPad.

In communications with vendors that have been ongoing for “some
time now,” according to one company, Apple has said that it will
remove both film-only solutions from its stores, as well as any
case or other accessory that includes film protection as part of
its package, such as cases that include film screen protectors.

Odd.

Update: Here’s an interesting comment on the iLounge piece:

I’m an Apple Retail employee who has applied roughly a million of
these films. A couple months ago, it became our policy not to help
apply them, because they’re so difficult to get perfect and it
became a liability issue (“There’s a speck of dust, give me a
new one free.”). Unless you’re in a vacuum, there’s a chance
of picking up dust between opening the package and putting the
film down.

Thinking about this some more, I think it’s about avoiding the suggestion that you should use such a film/protector thing. I.e. that if Apple is selling them, some number of iPhone/iPod buyers assume they ought to buy one. Whereas I think the iPhone is very much designed to be used as-is — no case, no film. The 3GS oleophobic-coated screen feels just perfect.

The presence of MP3 and AAC audio support in the browser preview,
and the promise of MPEG-4 and H.264 video support in the final
version of IE9, raise the question of what role Flash and
Silverlight, which are commonly used to handle these functions,
will play in IE9. Hachamovitch did not comment on this, but
pointed out that with IE9’s video, audio and SVG capabilities,
“you have an HTML 5 browser that does audio and video without
plugins”.

No canvas support in IE9, though. (Yet?) And, if you’re keeping score on codec support in major browsers, IE joins Safari and Chrome in supporting H.264 for video; Firefox, Opera, and Chrome support Ogg Theora.

There are a bunch of dedicated Wikipedia iPhone apps, and there are several I like. But I like Articles, a brand new $3 app by Sophia Teutschler, best. It’s fast, it looks great (including the formatting of articles), and it has a very clever MobileSafari-inspired UI.

Until now, my answer to the first question has been that while much of what the bankers did was reprehensible, it was perfectly legal. I still think this is the case—in finance, it is often the case that the biggest scandal is what you can get away with within the law—but the Valukas report raises the possibility that I was wrong, and that the big Wall Street firms were engaged in Enron-style accounting fraud.

Tuesday, 16 March 2010

Speaking of Nolobe, they’re holding a “fire sale” on their excellent file transfer app Interarchy — through Monday it’s on sale for just $20, including a free upgrade to the upcoming Interarchy 10. And a slew of other indie Mac developers — Flying Meat, Red Sweater, Atebits, Stairways, and The Little App Factory — are participating with a 20 percent discount code (“FIRESALE10”).

Back in 2007 when we started on work on Iris there were no
easy-to-use, reasonably priced image editors available for the
Mac. If you wanted to edit images you had to get Photoshop, an
expensive and confusing proposition for the average user.

Fast forward to today and there are 4 reasonably priced image
editors available. They are all pretty good. One in particular,
Acorn by Flying Meat Software, is excellent. Simply put if Acorn
had existed back in 2007 we would never have started work on Iris.

The bad news: Nolobe is suspending development of Iris. The good news: existing Nolobe users get a free upgrade to Acorn. Very cool.

I said I’d believe when I saw it, and I’m delighted to report that AT&T’s 3G network was simply stellar at SXSW all weekend long — this, in contrast to last year, when it was pretty much worthless all weekend long. It’s worth noting, too, that SXSW Interactive attendance was way up once again this year, and, as far as I could tell, just about every single attendee was using an iPhone 3G or 3GS. Kudos to AT&T.

The keyboard dock is now slated to ship in May, and the case is shipping in “mid-April”. I think this is for new orders, though — when I checked my account just now at Apple’s web site, the case I ordered on Friday is still slated to be delivered on April 3.

Flurry — a mobile app analytics company — has published a comparison showing estimated sales over the first 74 days they were on sale:

Inspecting the graph, it’s immediately clear that Nexus One
sales continue to pale in comparison to iPhone 1G and Motorola
Droid, with each besting Nexus One sales by roughly 8 times over
the same time period.

At the same time, an interesting side-story is that the Motorola
Droid edged out iPhone 1G over the first 74 days, coming in at
just over one million sold through, by our calculations. This
was surprising enough that we re-ran our estimates several times
and still came up with the same results.

I don’t think Google ever intended the Nexus One to be a high-selling device; it’s pretty clear from Apple’s experiments with iPhone pricing that subsidized pricing drives sales. But still: if they’ve only sold 135K to date, that means they’ve sold fewer over 74 days than Apple has sold iPad pre-orders over the weekend.

Daniel Tello, a.k.a. “Deagol”, built a model to estimate iPad pre-orders based on order numbers submitted by volunteers throughout the weekend. It’s inexact, of course, but my money says these numbers are solid. And it’s worth emphasizing that these numbers do not include iPads that have been reserved for pickup at a retail Apple Store.

Keep in mind too, that this is for a machine that almost no one has seen, let alone used, in person.

Nearly 10,000 iPhone users were accessing the Microsoft employee
email system last year, say two people who heard the estimates
from senior Microsoft executives. That figure equals about 10% of
the company’s global work force.

Employees at Apple, in contrast, appear to be more devoted to the
company’s own mobile phone. Several people who work at the company
or deal regularly with employees there say they can’t recall
seeing Apple workers with mobile phones other than the iPhone in
recent memory. […]

One Microsoft worker said he knows several colleagues who try to
disguise their iPhones with cases that make them look more like
generic handsets. “Maybe once a year I’m in a meeting with Steve
Ballmer,” said this employee. “It doesn’t matter who’s calling,
I’m not answering my phone.”

It’s a schadenfreude-alicious nugget of information, sure. But it’s a telling indication of just how strong the iPhone is versus Windows Mobile. (Via Eric Slivka.)

Starting today, an additional version of the Nexus One is
available from the Google web store that is compatible with
AT&T’s 3G network. This new model can be purchased as an
unlocked device without a service plan. In addition to AT&T’s 3G
network, this device will also run on Rogers Wireless in Canada.
And like the first version of the Nexus One, it can be used with
most GSM operators globally.

Monday, 15 March 2010

From a big piece in the New York Times by Brad Stone and Miguel Helft:

One of these employees said Mr. Jobs returned to the topic of Google several times in the session and even disparaged its slogan “Don’t be evil” with an expletive, which drew thunderous applause from his underlings.

Tim Bray, on joining Google as a “developer advocate”, specifically relishing the competition between Android and iPhone:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

This is, indeed, the core difference between Android and iPhone: Apple’s tight control over native apps. I think it’s incorrect to call it Apple’s “vision of the mobile Internet’s future”, though. Native apps are not the Internet.

Later on, Bray writes:

I’m going to have to get savvier about HTML5-based applications, because a lot of smart people think the future’s there, that the “native app” notion will soon seem quaint.

What’s interesting here is that the iPhone is a better system for HTML5 mobile apps than Android. For all the attention Apple is getting regarding the tight control it maintains over native iPhone apps, I think what they’ve done to enable native-like mobile web apps — with no control — is mostly ignored.

The refusal has been issued on the grounds that the mark could
conflict with an existing NEXUS trademark (3554195) granted on
December 30, 2008 to Integra Telecom under the same class with a
description which includes the provision of telecommunication
services and the transmission of voice and data.

At the store, Roark had never been told that his HTC Eris has Android 1.5, nicknamed “Cupcake.” Until told by a reporter, he had no idea what features he’s missing as a result. For instance, free turn-by-turn navigation is available in the latest version, Android 2.1 (”Eclair”), but is only available to Cupcake users for $10 a month from Verizon.

Saturday, 13 March 2010

My thanks to Sourcebits for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Sourcebits is a contract developer specializing in iPhone, mobile, Mac, and Web software. Their iPhone apps have been downloaded over 4.5 million times from the App Store, and they have a growing list of Android and BlackBerry apps, too. If you’re looking for software development services, check out Sourcebits’s web site for examples of their work, such as DailyDeeds, a new iPhone app they just launched this week.

Friday, 12 March 2010

iPad apps have a high visual fidelity to real-world objects but
retain the sensible interaction design one would expect from
Apple. iBooks doesn’t force you to swipe its pages side-to-side;
you tap on a page to advance to the next one, and the page-turning
animation is done in a fraction of a second.

That’s in response to this fine post from Marco Arment, which makes some strong points regarding the design of calculator apps. Marco is in love with Soulver, a $19 Mac calculator I don’t recall seeing before, which indeed looks quite clever.

You can check your data usage in Settings on your iPad anytime.
And iPad will even let you know when you’re running out.
You’ll get three alerts as you near your 250MB limit — at 20
percent, 10 percent, and zero. With each alert, you can choose to
add more data or wait and do it later. Tap Now and iPad opens the
Cellular Data Plan window so you can update your data plan.

The orientation lock should be useful for reading while lying down. (For those curious: I ordered a 32 GB Wi-Fi model, the case, and the dock. Update: The plain dock, not the keyboard dock. I think using a Bluetooth keyboard will be more comfortable.)

Thursday, 11 March 2010

Speaking of SXSW, if you’re going, you’re going to love SitBy.us, an iPhone-optimized web app from Weightshift. As they describe it:

If you’ve ever been to SXSW Interactive, you know that it can be
difficult to find where your friends are sitting in a panel,
particularly in the massive auditoriums and the notorious 18BCD.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let your friends know where
you’re sitting — or find out where they are — in an
easy-to-use app?

Speaking of RSS and advertising revenue, Felix Salmon has a piece on Gawker Media’s decision to switch from full-text to excerpts in their feeds. He quotes Nick Denton from this comment on Lifehacker:

Gawker Media is an ad-supported company. RSS ads have never
realized their potential. At the same time we sell plenty of ads
on our website. So, yes, it is in our interest for people to click
through if enticed by an excerpt.

Salmon, in an update, points to this comment from Matt McAlister, who says that The Guardian has seen web traffic go up after switching from excerpts to full-text feeds. I.e., even without monetizing the feeds themselves, The Guardian thinks switching to full-text feeds was a win financially.

These benchmarks from Mike Chambers are more interesting to me than the aforelinked ones from Jan Ozer, if only because he ran them on the same hardware. Safari once again blows away Chrome and Firefox on the Mac — especially on JavaScript/Canvas examples, but even on Flash ones. Perhaps more interestingly, his results show Flash Player doing pretty well on the Mac (in Safari) compared to Windows overall, including HD video playback from Vimeo.

Because they can now actually use their computers instead of
simply restarting them, I’m able to better see how they use
them. And the one commonality I’ve seen is that no one knows how
to use the file system.

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so
complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents
folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides
booby traps and minotaurs.

Speaking of HTML5 video and Flash, Dave Hall has released a new GPL-licensed JavaScript project that lets you embed videos in HTML using the simple HTML5 <video> element; for browsers that don’t support HTML5 video, the Html5media script swaps in a Flash player.

Ozer draws the conclusion that Flash Player’s access to hardware acceleration is the key advantage to its superior performance on Windows. And, indeed, the best results in the whole test were for Flash Player 10.1 on Windows. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Mac OS X eventually offers similar APIs — seems like a serious performance win.)

But there are a lot of other interesting numbers in Ozer’s results. Particularly if you look at Flash Player 10.0, which doesn’t use hardware acceleration on Windows, either. In both Chrome and Firefox, Flash uses about twice as much CPU time to render the same video on the Mac as on Windows. Flash performance is noticeably better in Safari on the Mac than it is in Chrome or Firefox — I did not know that. Video performance in Chrome for Mac — both HTML5 and Flash — is downright terrible. (YouTube ought to stop telling Mac-using Safari users to “Try YouTube in a fast, new web browser!” with a link to Chrome.)

Bottom line: Flash plays H.264 video at least twice as efficiently on Windows as on the Mac; Safari’s native HTML5 video playback is very efficient.

The whole test might need to be taken with a grain of salt though. Ozer couldn’t get Bootcamp working on his MacBook Pro, so:

Birdfeed, Buzz Andersen’s outstanding iPhone Twitter client, has been purchased by Brizzly, updated, and rebranded as Brizzly for iPhone — and is now available from the App Store as a free download. There are some nice additions (such as the addictive pull-down-to-refresh gesture introduced by Tweetie), but a few steps back as well, including the loss of Birdfeed’s visual charm.

My main gripe is that it’s not a direct Twitter client any longer. Rather than sign in to Twitter, you sign in with an account at Brizzly. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you must hook them up to your Brizzly account. I don’t see any benefit to this, but I do see an extra potential point of failure. The deal breaker for me, alas, is that they seem to have eliminated Birdfeed’s Instapaper support.

On the upside: our long national nightmare of conflating Birdfeed and Birdhouse is now over.

“What’s in the David Foster Wallace Archive?”, from Meredith Blake at The New Yorker:

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a
battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema
Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten
notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a
blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in
sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus
cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and
most film genres (with the notable exception of the
‘gangster/crime film’).”

New weblog by Theis Søndergaard, featuring scanned pages from old issues of Wired:

This blog is not intended to be just a point-and-laugh central,
picking apart the mistakes of the past and ridiculing those who
got it wrong. You won’t have to look long for posts that do
that, of course… but the main purpose of this blog is to put the
past into perspective. In the fast paced world of tech, we often
lure ourselves into believing that everything is different now,
and old rules don’t apply. Well, quite often they do (if not
always) and checking out our collective tech-past can help us get
a perspective on the present.

I don’t understand why companies think that they can get away
with doing this. The internet is a surprisingly small place, and
we were notified almost immediately. We’ve all had a good
chuckle about this, but we’ve contacted Mozilla and demanded
that they take the design down.

Really does seem bizarre that anyone thought this wouldn’t be noticed.

Update:Mozilla apologizes, and is “actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again.”

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Technologizer asked some of the industry’s big brains about what
Microsoft needs to do to keep its operating system relevant in the
years to come. Their advice ranges from merely simplifying the
interface to borrowing ideas from other Microsoft products such as
the Xbox to giving the OS a complete reboot. Here’s what they
(and we) have to say.

Some interesting (and widely varying) answers. I like Scott Rosenberg’s take best:

Microsoft ought to build a new, modern, stripped-down OS and
support the legacy stuff in a virtual machine. Call the new
environment WIN instead of WINDOWS, suggesting a new stripped-down
nimbleness. Make it clear that the old world will be supported for
a long time but not forever. Dazzle people with what they can do
in a new world.

Or just maintain Windows in parallel. Point is, there’s no reason why Microsoft should have one and only one PC desktop operating system. Why not two: the new cool no-cruft one; and Windows, the established, familiar, chock-full-of-baggage-and-legacy-compatibility one.

Much of this “wait for the price drop” sentiment stems from
the original iPhone 4 GB and 8GB models, which debuted in late
June of 2007 for $499 and $599, respectively. By September of that
same year, the 4 GB model was scrapped and the 8 GB unit dropped
$200 to $399. The situation generated an early adapter uproar by
many — myself included — and Apple tried to make good with $100
Apple Store credits for those who paid the higher prices.

The entire event tarnished Apple’s luster in the eyes of
consumers and this isn’t a company that repeats mistakes often.

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called
Project Looking Glass, Steve called my office to let me know the
graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP =
Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we
moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”

Amazon’s response to Colorado’s state tax issue — Governor
Bill Ritter signed a bill that puts new restrictions and taxes on
out-of-state retailers like Amazon — has been consistent. When
things go against Amazon the retailer cuts its affiliate programs
in that state.

Internally it’s called something stupid, like a “license plate
name” or somesuch. HP IT does that so they can physically locate a
server when it goes down.

Externally, you’re seeing how one department’s braindead internal
policy designed for their convenience reduces the convenience of
the entire rest of the company (and our customers). I’d blame
Randy Mott (of WalMart pedigree) who has proven to be quite a
Napoleon (or perhaps Brutus is a better example?) when it comes to
turf battles, but I think that policy pre-dated him.

Many folks internally in HP hate those license plate external URLs
but there’s nothing we can do about it. The policy has been set
from on-high.

So because of a dictum from the IT department, HP — one of the biggest, proudest, and most successful companies in the history of the computer business — has URLs that are cryptic, long, and ugly. Whereas anyone with, say, a Tumblr account, can get far nicer URLs for free.

RealNetworks just screwed us all by settling lawsuits in which it
might have lost — but which might also have given some new life
to fair use for digital media. The post-RealDVD world means that
unless there’s a major change to the law surrounding copy
protection, there will never be a legal way to perform legal acts
of copying or shifting protected movies, music, and games.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, quoting from a report from Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner on the behind-the-scenes aspects of Apple’s patent suit against HTC:

Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level
discussions with tier-1 handset makers to underscore its growing
displeasure at seeing its iPhone-related IP [intellectual
property] infringed. The lawsuit filed against HTC thus appears to
be Apple’s way of putting a public, lawyered-up exclamation point
on a series of blunt conversations that have been occurring behind
closed doors.

Our checks also suggest that these warning shots are meaningfully
disrupting the development roadmaps for would-be iPhone killers.
Rival software and hardware teams are going back to the drawing
board to look for work-arounds. Lawyers are redoubling efforts to
gauge potential defensive and offensive responses. And strategy
teams are working to chart OS strategies that are better hedged.

Reiner concludes that the effect is going to be to drive would-be Android handset makers into the arms of Microsoft and Windows Phone 7.

Interestingly enough, the Mariposa bot is not the only malware I
found on the Vodafone HTC Magic phone. There’s also a Confiker
and a Lineage password stealing malware. I wonder who’s doing QA
at Vodafone and HTC these days?

In the comments, Bustamante writes:

Regardless, I don’t think this has to do with factory settings,
but rather with poor QA process of refurbished phones.

Farhad Manjoo’s piece for Slate on Apple’s patent infringement legal action against HTC bears the headline “Apple’s Multitouch Lawsuit Is Both Dumb and Dangerous”, which is slightly odd, insofar as that none of the patents Apple cited are related to multitouch.

Which raises the question: Why not? Multitouch is certainly the aspect of the iPhone user interface that has been most-talked about with regard to patents, ever since it debuted at Macworld Expo in 2007 and Jobs flat-out bragged about how patented it was. Maybe the aspects of multitouch that HTC has added to the Nexus One don’t violate the patents?

Update:Nilay Patel says none of Apple’s granted patents cover pinch-to-zoom, which, as far as I can tell, is the only “multitouch” supported on the Nexus One. Apple has pending patents on pinch-to-zoom and other multi-finger gestures, but who knows if they’ll be granted.

A job posting for a browser engineer at Lab126, the
division of Amazon that develops the Kindle, indicates the company
is looking for somebody to develop “an innovative embedded web
browser” for a consumer product. […]

The Kindle’s current browsing experience is notably sub-par.
It’s good enough to check your e-mail, post to Twitter or read
Wikipedia, but it doesn’t handle images or more complex web apps
particularly well. It certainly doesn’t live up to the same
vision of the mobile web being outlined by the iPhone, or Android
phones like the Droid or Nexus One.

Calore is right that the current Kindle browser is poor, but I wonder whether this job opening is for the Kindle. One problem Amazon would have with a Kindle armed with a good mobile browser is that it might encourage too much use of the browser — existing Kindles don’t have Wi-Fi and only access the Internet via “free” 3G networking. The reason Amazon can provide free 3G is that it’s typically only used for buying books. Add a great browser and I don’t see how they could afford free 3G. (Maybe future Kindles will be Wi-Fi only?)

However, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to unify the two
operating systems for 4.0 with the timeline they are working with.
Rather, I expect Apple to release OS 4.1 in September or October.
It will not only address issues with the 4.0 release, but also
unify the operating systems.

Oh, you thought the gaming news was all sunshine and roses for Apple today? Not so, reports Sebastian Anthony at Download Squad:

Apple, with its locked-down, isolated sandbox is in trouble. Do
game developers have any reason to continue working on games for
the iPhone or iPad now that Microsoft is offering so much more? […]

Can Apple really see themselves competing, with a minuscule
desktop market share and 25% of the smartphone sector? Steve Jobs
has announced Apple’s intent to move into mobile gaming, but can
you really see developers siding with the iPhone when Windows
Phone 7 is just around the corner?

Answering the question, “Is the iPad just a big iPhone?” in the negative. Love this bit about the lack of hovering:

Here’s why this section is about Controls: every day, your
cursor protects you from unclear UI. It helpfully turns into a
text cursor as you hover over textboxes, or a hand as you hover
over a link or action item.

iPad has no such thing. Bad UI will stick out like a sore thumb,
both in apps and on websites. Your tappable areas had better look
tappable. Your controls had better look controllable.

AT&T’s first Android phone, the Motorola Backflip, ships with an outdated version of the OS (1.5; current version is 2.1) and comes with a bunch of AT&T-added apps that can’t be deleted. They’d do the same with the iPhone if it were up to them.

HP is banking heavily on the inclusion of Flash to be a selling point vs. the iPad. My gut feeling is that Flash will prove irrelevant, and that this thing will go nowhere simply because Windows 7 is terribly suited to a touchscreen tablet.

(And what in the world is the deal with the crazy server name in HP’s weblog URLs?)

If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll
get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam
Play. […] By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company
introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online,
then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re
playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then
head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your
game-in-progress.

He thinks it’s a scam to make it harder for iPhone (and soon, iPad) owners to use Wi-Fi, so that they instead use 3G and run up service charges. This is nutty. The carriers — AT&T especially — really do want iPhone owners to use Wi-Fi. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is practically begging iPad users to use Wi-Fi.

Plus, the iPhone has built-in features for finding open Wi-Fi networks, right there in the Settings app. By default it even lets you know when it finds an open network. It boggles the mind that anyone would think there’s something fishy about these apps being removed.

Bigelow did it, I believe, because she quite simply made the best
film: The tension generated by the film was extraordinary. Yes,
situations involving defusing bombs are common enough, but somehow
Bigelow made the bomb scenes human, not technical. Perhaps that
was the woman in her?

I’d say they pretty much got it right with the winners this year. The tribute to John Hughes was very nice.

Sunday, 7 March 2010

A site like Ars, with a tech-savvy audience, is the hardest hit. Fisher claims 40 percent of Ars readers are blocking their ads, and points out that many readers running ad blockers aren’t even aware that they’re costing sites money:

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks
on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is
wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a
per view basis.

I have no easy answer, but I will point out that there’s no inherent reason why ads have to be something people are tempted to block. It’s not enough to ask readers not to block ads — you’ve got to work hard at providing ads that readers actually enjoy, or at least aren’t tempted to block.

Update: There’s a prisoners’ dilemma problem with ad blockers, where it doesn’t matter if one site shows reasonable ads if others show crap ads, because those crap ads will drive users to install ad-blocking software, and ad-blocking software casts a wide net and blocks as much as it can. It’s unlikely that most ad-blocker-using Ars readers installed their ad-blocker because of the ads on Ars Technica.

Bill Ray for The Register, on the Wi-Fi scanning apps removed from the App Store last week:

Wi-Fi detection is something of a niche: there were never more
than a handful of such applications in iTunes. But now even those
have vanished as Apple decided they were using a “private
framework”, and has pulled them off the shelves without
explanation or apology. […]

“We received a very unfortunate email today from Apple stating
that WiFi Where has been removed from sale on the App Store for
using private frameworks to access wireless information,” explains
one developer, though Apple has apparently declined to explain
exactly what rule the scanning applications are breaking.

Saturday, 6 March 2010

They call it a “plugin development kit”, but what it really means is that developers can write compiled C/C++ apps for WebOS now. And according to John Paczkowski:

Perhaps more important, the PDK will allow developers to rewrite
mobile apps created for other platforms to run on webOS with
minimal modification. Apps that currently run on Apple’s
iPhone, for example, can be ported over in a matter of days,
sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really
suffer any degradation in performance.

I can only assume that this is in reference to games with cross-platform cores, not utility-type apps that are Cocoa Touch through-and-through.

Friday, 5 March 2010

I stand corrected regarding the original expectations for iPad availability worldwide. During the iPad introduction event last month, the slide stating that the Wi-Fi models would be available in “60 days” also included this underneath: “Worldwide availability of WiFi models”.

Very interesting, but note that this is not a demo of a device, or even of actual software. It’s a demo of a concept. I’d wager money that we’ll never see an actual product from Microsoft that works like this.

If the ship date was to be April 3, why didn’t Jobs say so at
the January event?

Obviously, it’s impossible to say. Though it’s certainly
interesting that Jobs couldn’t offer a hard ship date for a
major product that was just two months out.

Does this mean Apple may have run into a bit of an iPad
manufacturing hiccup after all? I suppose it’s possible.
Cannaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek, who first reported alleged
production issues with the iPad, certainly thinks so.

My sources suggest that Misek is wrong. It was the software, not the hardware, that took a week or two longer to finish than they’d hoped. Nothing extraordinary or unusual, just the usual hard-to-predict timing of turning software that’s almost ready to ship into software that’s ready to ship. In the grand history of major OS release date slips, one week is pretty tame.

Update: Some readers are arguing that it must be a hardware delay, because sales outside the U.S. don’t start for another month. Could be that there are manufacturing delays, too, I suppose. But I was never under the impression that Apple ever intended for the iPad to go on sale worldwide on day one. Is the delay before sales in Europe a change?

This is interesting: when the Photoshop.com Mobile 1.1 app for Android is installed, Android developers can, in their own apps, use Photoshop for Android’s image editor as an embedded view. Android calls this an “activity”; it’s sort of analogous to a service on Mac OS X. (There’s nothing like it in iPhone OS 3.x.)

Thursday, 4 March 2010

Thoughtful, beautifully illustrated essay by Craig Mod on the future of books. I think he’s got it exactly right. (And I agree with him that iBooks’s “paper page turning” metaphor is the wrong one for long form iPad reading and design.)

Wednesday, 3 March 2010

“Every generation needs its own heroes. One decade into the 21st
century, it’s time to honor the last great president of the 20th
and give President Reagan a place beside Presidents Roosevelt and
Kennedy.”

The company’s representatives have recently spoken with some of
the major film studios about enabling iTunes users to store their
content on the company’s servers, two people familiar with the
discussions told CNET. That’s in addition to streaming television
shows and music. […] Apple’s vision is to build proverbial
digital shelves where iTunes users store their media, one of the
sources said. “Basically, they want to eliminate the hard drive,”
the source said.

There are two ways to interpret this. One would be that Apple will provide online storage for your iTunes purchases as backup, so that if your hard drive fails or your computer is lost or if you simply buy more movies than you have space to store yourself, you still have access to everything you’ve bought. Think of this model as like IMAP for iTunes content — it would also allow multiple devices (computer, iPhone, iPad) to remain in sync over the air, rather than the current model where devices need to be tethered via USB to your computer in order to sync. I think this would be fantastic. As it stands now, iTunes customers are responsible for the data integrity of their purchases. Update: Think of it this way: if Apple doesn’t do something like this, then what’s the model for owning an iPad as your primary computing device?

The other way to interpret it — the dystopic take — is that Apple wants to remove local storage entirely, except perhaps as a cache that we can’t control. In this model, if you disconnect from Apple’s servers, you lose access to your library. (Given that we’re lucky to complete phone calls on weekday afternoons in certain U.S. metro areas, we’re a ways off from this being feasible, even if it is what Apple has in mind.)

Eric Von Hippel, professor of technological innovation at MIT, in an interview with The New York Times:

“It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was
supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society
gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation,
and in the end, the public loses out.”

Yes, the patent system is supposed to reward the innovators themselves, but it is also supposed to benefit the public interest.

Tuesday, 2 March 2010

The phone is the Motorola Backflip. I presume Motorola and/or AT&T did this because they worked out a deal with Yahoo where they get paid for making them the default search engine.

Interesting proof of just how much freedom Android’s open source licensing model offers to handset makers and carriers. What are the odds that AT&T and Motorola will be able to make a Windows Phone 7 handset with, say, Google as the default search engine?

The second film in the series (after Dr. No). I watched it last night for the first time in a long while. So, so good. Low on the cockamamie; high on style and lovely details, including beautiful on-location footage of early-60s Istanbul. The plot revolves around a Russian code machine and a possible defector (who is, of course, a hot chick), not a preposterous plot to destroy the Earth or all of Western civilization.

Not just quintessential James Bond, but maybe the best Bond — funny, not corny, a spy movie, not an action movie.

Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough”
for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went
live Monday, dumping Flash. […] Virgin picked HTML to give users
of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking
in through their phone.

The look-and-feel — and in some cases, like the task killer and file manager, entire purpose — of these apps is as good a summary as any of the differences between Android and iPhone OS. (SlideScreen being the notable exception.)

The panorama sequence appears to be an interface for an interface,
a distancing from the core activities of users, who just want to
get on with what they want to do. My view is to let the user’s
eyes do more on a screen-image rich with opportunities rather than
having to move through a sequence of thin decorative screens in
order to find the desired action.

Nilay Patel, Esq. has a rundown of the patents at Engadget. Some of these sound like the worst sort of software patent bullshit, like “Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image”, but others are hard to judge from the name alone. And despite Apple’s PR saying there are 20 patents at issue, they seem to have only listed 10.

Apple today filed a lawsuit against HTC for infringing on 20 Apple
patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying
architecture and hardware. The lawsuit was filed concurrently with
the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and in U.S. District
Court in Delaware.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented
inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do
something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think
competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own
original technology, not steal ours.”

Off the top of my head, this is the first time I can recall Apple filing a patent lawsuit against a competitor except as a counter-suit (e.g. against Nokia). I can’t speak to the hardware and “architecture” issues, but I despise the idea of “user interface” patents.

Monday, 1 March 2010

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the
meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we
advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result
in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained
trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.

It’s one thing for an app on the iPhone to query the web, talk
to its own or others’ servers, but something entirely different
for Opera Mini to proxy the entire web through its own
proprietary servers. Yes, you read it right. Opera gets in between
you and every single URL out there, from your bank to your
school to your doctor’s office. You never communicate with any
site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to
that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language,
compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can
understand it.

I understand that advertisers like “verticals” to pitch certain
kinds of products, and are allegedly leery of individual bloggers
with style. I also know in this media climate how vital
advertising is, and how our survival online is critical to our
endurance in print. I am not a businessman. And I deeply believe
in the Atlantic, as readers well know. If this keeps us afloat,
that sure is better than going under. If there is business genius
here, congrats to all involved.

But treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize
pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader
communities and their integrity. I hope they get restored to
their previous coherence, and these amorphous “channels” gain some
editorial identity. I hope writers like Fallows and Goldberg
aren’t treated as random fodder — anchors! — for “channels”. I
believe in the Atlantic as a place for writing. The redesign
seems to me to ooze casual indifference to that and to the respect
that individual writers deserve.

If you’re not a regular reader of The Atlantic’s online content (if you’re interested at all in politics and national affairs, I recommend it highly), prior to their new redesign, they hosted about half a dozen individual writers’ weblogs. They looked and felt like separate blogs under The Atlantic’s parent umbrella. The redesign throws all but Sullivan’s together into a hash.

Count me in with Sullivan that this is, from a reader’s perspective, a change much for the worse.

(Noteworthy: Sullivan states that his Daily Dish accounts for 55-60 percent of The Atlantic’s online traffic; hence the exception.)

Shawn Blanc on the state of iPhone feed reading apps. In short, there are a bunch that are pretty good, but not one that’s great. (I’m still using NetNewsWire, but I keep trying all the others when they release new versions.)

Five of the leading publishers — Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast,
Wenner Media, and Meredith — have banded together for this
“power of print” campaign, reminiscent of a similar campaign
by newspaper publishers a few years ago, when the world was
slightly rosier. […] One ad says: “The Internet is fleeting.
Magazines are immersive.”

Sure, that’ll do it. Also, I did not know this:

And of course who else but the troglodyte Jann Wenner to
“orchestrate” this campaign, the guy whose magazine Rolling
Stone can’t figure out how to keep a domain name up; and oh
wait, who outsources the running of the mag website to
RealNetworks, until late last year. That Wenner. Good luck, the
other four.

But it turns out that the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a
single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. The fact that A4
uses a single A8 core hasn’t been made public, but I’ve heard
from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons
that this is indeed the case. (I wish I could be more specific,
but I can’t.)